86 ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM
force of law.1 We have not interfered seriously with the practice of infant marriages. Save in respect to slavery,2 we have left intact the personal law both of Hindoos and Mohammedans—albeit that in both cases the codes were drawn up centuries ago to suit the conditions of primitive societies. But in spite of these, and other illustrations of a like nature which might be cited, do not let us for one moment imagine that we have not been innovators, and, in the eyes of the ordinary conservative
1 " Usage, once recorded upon evidence given, immediately becomes written and fixed law. Nor is it any longer obeyed as usage. . . . There would be little evil in the British Government giving to native custom a constraining force which it never had in purely native society, if popular opinion could be brought to approve of the gradual amelioration of that custom. Unfortunately for us, we have created the sense of legal right before we have created a proportionate power of distinguishing good from evil in the law upon which the legal right depends (Maine, " Village Communities," pp. 72, 73).
2 In 1843, an Act was passed by the Indian Legislature which provided that the status of slavery should not be recognized by any law-court in the country, criminal or civil. No such sweeping reform has been effected in Egypt, but a series of measures have been adopted, the general result of which is that the institution of slavery is moribund (see " Modern Egypt/* vol. ii., pp. 495-504).